#105 – A Blog TLDR: Why have dietary guidelines been so wrong? (Mike Haney & Ben Grynol)

Every five years the U.S. government updates official dietary guidelines. Where did these dietary guidelines come from in the first place? How are they put together? And how should people think about them? In this episode, Levels Head of Growth, Ben Grynol, chatted with Editorial Director, Mike Haney, to provide us with a TLDR of the Levels blog article, “Why have dietary guidelines been so wrong, and how do they still need to change?”

04:35 – Updated guidelines every five years

Government guidelines started as a project in 1980 and they’ve been updated every five years since.

It’s that phrase is a little bit of a catch-all. When people say dietary guidelines, so there are official government dietary guidelines. And basically that started roughly in the late sixties, seventies that the government started saying, “Hey, we should probably have some kind of official policy guidance around all of the different departments that interact with food.” And we’ll talk about what all those are and the impact they have now. The first official ones were really in 1980. And so now there’s an actual sort of statute that says the government has to produce, every five years, a set of dietary guidelines. And it’s a joint project between the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services. They work together to produce these. They update them every five years. So when we say the government dietary guidelines, when we think of the food pyramid or what’s now called MyPlate, the kind of stuff that taught in health class, that’s the basis of where those come from.

06:40 – People are confused about nutrition

There are many different sets of guidelines from various health organizations, but there is also new research coming out regularly. People don’t know what to follow.

I think it was absolutely true. And there’s actually pretty good research on this. That people are fairly confused about nutrition advice. I think there’s a stat that we cite in one of our articles, something like 60% of people say they are confused. They don’t know what is sort of the right thing to eat. So I think it’s absolutely true that people are confused about nutrition advice. I wouldn’t lay most of that at the feet of the dietary guidelines. And I think that’s probably beyond an official government program or even the guidelines from any of these individual organizations to solve. I think that comes about because there’s a lot of news coverage. The kinds of stuff we write, the kinds of stuff a lot of people write, health publications, mainstream news publications, about nutrition and dietary advice. That’s often based on research, there’s a ton of nutrition research that happens.

09:10 – Guidelines are directional at best

Nutrition is highly individual both biologically and culturally, so these guidelines are best looked at as general directions.

First biological, our bodies react differently to different kinds of food. But also cultural reasons, affordability reasons, historical reasons. There’s all kinds of reasons that nutrition is individual. So take all of that. And there’s a lot of other reasons. Those are just a handful. All of that says, boy, it’s really hard to tell people what to eat. And as a person trying to read guidance, whether that’s in a story in the New York Times or a story on our site or the official government guidelines, it’s really difficult to distill down the question of like, all right, what should I eat? Even though that’s what a lot of folks really want to know. So I do think there’s confusion that comes in. And I think the, put in the most charitable way, I think the goals of anybody who’s putting out sort of dietary guidelines, whether that be the American Heart Association or whether it be the government, or even to the extent that we try to distill things down into understandable guidance, we’re trying to cut through some of that confusion and give people something to sort of latch onto and say, all right, at least directionally, here’s some kind of advice. And I think that’s probably the right lens to look at the dietary guidelines through, as opposed to this is absolutely the word from God.

15:09 – The guidelines lag behind science

Government guidelines will always take a more conservative approach to change.

These guidelines are always going to be a little bit behind the most recent science. The departments that put these out are going to be conservative in what they’re telling people to do. They’re not going to try to be on the cutting edge. Because, I think again, looking at it charitably, I think the thing they want to avoid is any more whiplash than necessary from one set to another. They don’t want people who get the sense that the government is changing its mind every five years about what you should do, because there’s enough confusion out there already. So if what you’re trying to do is just directionally point people the right way. You want to try to come back to some very basic things that are pretty widely agreed upon. And on that spectrum that all nutrition science lies on between really front end kind of new theory, maybe only shown in animal models or cell models, all the way up to things that have been maybe studied for decades and that are pretty widely agreed upon, government regulations that happen every five years for government guidelines are going to lean more toward the latter. They’re going to lean more toward the more well established stuff. So even though most of the current food advice probably turned away from carbs and refined grains sooner than the government did, it just takes a while for those guidelines to catch up.

17:18 – Beware of industry influences

There are conflicts of interest that occur when making these guidelines because the food industry funds a lot of nutrition research.

Dr. Lustig has been a great voice on this, and goes into great detail in his book to reveal more of how that happens and what that kind of relationship looks like. And even in the last 10 years or so, there were some independent review, and National Academy of Sciences reviewed the process by which guidelines were created and found that there was probably more bias and conflicts of interest on the committees creating the guidelines than is ideal. Which is to say relationships with food industry of the people who were working on the guidelines. And this is a big problem in nutrition science in general, that a lot of nutrition science is funded by the food industry because as a nutrition scientist somebody has to pay for your work. Oftentimes the best way to find that funding is in the nutrition business. There’s a whole other debate about whether or not that actually then influences the science.

22:13 – More data will bring better guidelines

As we gather more health data, guidelines will improve and better information will be available to more segments of the population.

More data will absolutely be helpful in revealing more of what’s going on in the body, more of the mechanisms. And as I think our goal here is to be able to move a lot of the advice and guidance upstream, to make it more individual, to allow people to sort of make better choices, which getting back to our topic here of dietary guidelines, will change the role. I think ultimately we’re probably talking 20 years down the line here of what dietary guidelines are seeking to do, when we ultimately have better individual pictures of what’s going on in our bodies and how our bodies respond. And that information is widely disseminated, not just concentrated among a very small group of sort of bio hackery folks. But if lots of people have access to that kind of data, you can see a world in which that really affects how dietary guidelines are created and what the purpose of them is.

24:02 – Even flawed, they still matter

These guidelines may be vague and not up to cutting-edge science, but they do help direct food assistance programs.

The reason that these guidelines were created in the first place was because there’s an awful lot of departments that have to create policy that is much more prescriptive and specific about particular foods, or sort of a nutritional picture. So for example, school lunches, SNAP, which was formally known as food stamps here, but is a food assistance program. WIC, which is a food assistance program for new mothers and for infants. Those kinds of programs have very specific kind of calorie and macronutrient mixes or specific foods that become part of the policy that say, okay, kids in school lunches have to have X number of servings of vegetables, and here’s what counts as a vegetable. Or they can only have this much sugar. And that kind of advice does flow down stream from these guidelines. That’s where the guidelines actually do matter. They do direct actual policy that translates into real food that people eat if they’re interacting with these government programs, which lots of people do. Half the babies in this country are involved in WIC in some way.

25:05 – Still too much sugar

The government considered reducing recommendations around sugar, but decided not to. This could have negative impacts over time.

In 2020, they were looking at guidelines again, and the committee who worked on them recommended dropping sugar from 10% of the calories to 6% of the calories. The ultimate guideline stuck with the 10% figure. And Dr. Casey Means, our Chief Medical Officer, wrote a great op-ed talking specifically about this and diving a little bit more into the role that guidelines play. And ultimately their rationale for it was that there wasn’t enough science to show that there was a reason to change. That the status quo was 10%. And that even though the committee had sort of staunchly advised dropping it to 6%, given their read of the science, again, leaning toward that sort of conservative don’t change it unless we really have a good reason to change it. The guidelines stayed at 10%. Now what’s the difference between six and 10%. Maybe it’s not that much. But if you think about a kid’s school lunch and how big of a Twinkie they’re going to get in their school lunch, or how much dessert or how much added sugar can be in the foods that they’re eating, over time that definitely makes a difference.

29:22 – Look at guidance overlaps and tweak them for yourself

There are some major areas where all of the guidelines agree, like focusing on whole foods. Stick to those things and then look for additional guidance that suits you individually.

And I think where these, any kind of guidelines or guidance, whether it be from the government or folks that you follow, should be taken as directional and you should look for the things that do sort of intersect. So things like focus on whole foods. Try to eat things that actually look like food. Try to limit processed food. Like you probably won’t go wrong by following some of that basic kind of advice. And if you just do that, if you limit the amount of sort of additional additives, processed stuff, added sugar, added salt, added fat. And if you focus on eating whole foods, that look like foods, that’s a good place to start. And I think from there exactly to your point, you can further tweak if you find people who eat in a way that looks good to you, that is the kind of food that you’re interested in, and that as you experiment find makes you feel better.

32:50 – Your diet should be aspirational

There is no such thing as the perfect diet. But you can do your best in lots of areas.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I actually, I pulled out a really nice quote as I was looking back at this article. We ended on a really nice quote from Mark Hyman in Food Fix that I think is worth sort of sharing out here. Where he says, “Your diet should be aspirational, not perfect. It should contribute to better health for you, a better world for humans, including food workers and farm workers, and a better world for the environment, our climate, and our economy.” I really like that idea that your diet should be aspirational, not perfect to just remind us that there is no perfect diet. It’s too individual for that. There’s a lot of other factors that you can bring into it, or not, depending on your own personal values and what’s important to you. And relieve a little bit of the stress around thinking you’re going to find a perfect diet. And certainly, again, to tie back to our article that whatever the government is handed down in their latest MyPlate graphic is the perfect thing, it’s all directional and that’s useful. It’s useful to have that direction.

Mike Haney (00:06):

So in 2020, they were looking at guidelines again. And the committee who worked on them recommended dropping sugar from 10% of the calories to 6% of the calories. The ultimate guidelines stuck with the 10% figure. And ultimately their rationale for it was there wasn’t enough signs to show that there was a reason to change. That the status quo was 10%. And that even though the committee had sort of staunchly advised dropping it to 6%, given their read of the science, again, leaning toward that sort of conservative don’t change it unless we really have a good reason to change it. The guideline stayed at 10%. Now what’s the difference between six and 10%. Maybe it’s not that much, but if you think about a kid’s school lunch and how big of a Twinkie they’re going to get in their school lunch, or how much dessert, or how much added sugar can be in the foods that they’re eating, over time that definitely makes a difference.

Ben Grynol (01:04):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol (01:30):

Dietary guidelines, probably heard of the food pyramid before. You’ve probably even seen the idea of what you should have on your plate. Where did this even come from? Well, Mike Haney, Editorial Director at Levels, he and I sat down and we deconstructed the idea of where did these dietary guidelines come from in the first place? How are they put together? And how can people think about them? There’s a lot of history with dietary guidelines. That being some of the macroeconomic factors, and then that being some of the things like policy and governance. Why they’re not quick to change and what people can do about them. How they can think about them. Should they follow them or should they follow independent advice or feedback from other thought leaders in the space? Essentially, everyone has to think about things when it comes to diet, food, fitness, lifestyle from a personalization perspective.

Ben Grynol (02:19):

Well, Mike and I, we sat down and we deconstructed one of the blog posts. We called it a blog TLDR. And we really had a conversation around it. It was a really good opportunity to take some of the things that are in written form, break them down to a conversational level, and probe, ask further questions. Like, why did this happen? How did all these things come together? It was really fun to do with Mike. And it felt a little bit NPR-ish. We’ll probably do it again. This was one of our continued content experiments. Here’s the conversation with Mike.

Ben Grynol (02:55):

We’re going to deconstruct this blog post. This one that is, why have dietary guidelines been so wrong and how do they still need to change? So why don’t we go back to, the way this came about to begin with is the way that a lot of blog posts are formed within our team. It’s just like this lens of like, do you have any info on this?

Mike Haney (03:18):

Yeah, exactly. This one actually came from Tom Griffin, who’s our Head of Partnerships, lobbing a question over, I think it was Slack at the time saying, hey. He’d come into contact somewhere with the dietary guidelines, the sort of official dietary guidelines, and just had this moment of revelation that like, “God, these are really different than the kind of advice we find ourselves giving to people or that our advisors give to people. And why is there such a disconnect?” Why is it the case that, specifically the question he was asking and we’ll get into it, is why do they demonize fat so much when we’re often telling people to eat more fat or sort of eat the fat before the carbs? And why are carbs and sugar still such a part of the guidelines?

Mike Haney (03:57):

And it was a really interesting question that we hadn’t really dove into. We dive a lot into the science. We dive a lot to nutrition advice. But looking kind of upstream at those government regulations was a space we hadn’t got into. Fortunately, a lot of our advisors had written about this quite a bit. Mark Hyman and Rob Lustig, they both cover this in their books. So they were sort of good jumping off points for us to dive in and start to research this a little bit more and try to answer that question.

Ben Grynol (04:20):

It’s funny, because we’ve all heard of, there are certain things, we’ve all heard of dietary guidelines. But like what exact, break it down, what exactly are dietary guidelines and how did they, how do we even form them the way that we did?

Mike Haney (04:35):

Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s that phrase is a little bit of a catch all. When people say dietary guidelines, so there are official government dietary guidelines. And basically that started roughly in the late sixties, seventies that the government started saying, “Hey, we should probably have some kind of official policy guidance around all of the different departments that interact with food.” And we’ll talk about what all those are and the impact they have now. The first official ones were really in 1980. And so now there’s an actual sort of statute that says the government has to produce, every five years, a set of dietary guidelines. And it’s a joint project between the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services. They work together to produce these. They update them every five years. So when we say the government dietary guidelines, when we think of the food pyramid or what’s now called MyPlate, the kind of stuff that taught in health class, that’s the basis of where those come from.

Mike Haney (05:26):

But what can be a little confusing is there’s other organizations that offer dietary guidelines, like most kind of medical professional organizations. So I’m thinking of the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, the Cancer Association. Several of those organizations also put out their own guidelines. So you might see stories about guidelines. And really what they’re talking about is maybe the American Heart Association has updated their guidance on saturated fat or on a particular topic that’s different than the government dietary guidelines. So mostly what we’re talking about in this article are the government dietary guidelines. These sort of official body that has to be produced every five years by statute.

Ben Grynol (06:05):

Do you think there’s confusion around these guidelines because there’s the, we’ll call it like the macro government’s, like here are the dietary guidelines. But then if you are from a personalization standpoint, if your lens is you’re more concerned about health and wellness as it relates to Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, or let’s say heart disease, do you think that causes confusion for people where they’re like, which one do I follow? Because I would imagine they’re juxtaposed in, one says do this and the other says don’t do this. Is that like relatively true? Or like what’s the outlook on that?

Mike Haney (06:40):

I think it was absolutely true. And there’s actually pretty good research on this. That people are fairly confused about nutrition advice. I think there’s a stat that we cite in one of our articles, something like 60% of people say they are confused. They don’t know what is sort of the right thing to eat. So I think it’s absolutely true that people are confused about nutrition advice. I wouldn’t lay most of that at the feet of the dietary guidelines. And I think that’s probably beyond an official government program or even the guidelines from any of these individual organizations to solve. I think that comes about because there’s a lot of news coverage. The kinds of stuff we write, the kinds of stuff a lot of people write, health publications, mainstream news publications, about nutrition and dietary advice. That’s often based on research, there’s a ton of nutrition research that happens.

Mike Haney (07:27):

And so as new discoveries come out, we write about them because we’re always looking for new and interesting things to write about. The trick is that nutrition, and this speaks back to the dietary guidelines, nutrition advice is really tricky. Nutrition research is really difficult. It’s really hard to do. We have a whole piece that is sort of eight ways to read a nutrition study that accounts for this and break down some of those reasons. But briefly, it’s that there’s population level research you can do. And then there’s sort of individual intervention research you can do, where a group of people eat this thing and another group people eat that thing or don’t eat it. And then we see what happens over eight weeks. There’s those kinds of studies. Some are blinded, some are not. Then there’s like big epidemiological studies where we look at usually survey data for maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of people and say, okay, over 10 years, people who ate an average of two eggs a day had 10% less chance of diabetes. I’m making that up. But there’s stats like that.

Mike Haney (08:21):

Both of those have their flaws. The first group of studies is using necessarily small groups and how strict that study design is can really influence what you end up finding out. The epidemiological stuff is great, because you have a huge population, but it’s also just much less specific. Nutrition surveys are usually based on recall. People often don’t remember what they ate that morning or they’re sort of aspirational in saying what they ate. And so it’s really difficult to tease out through any kind of a study design, the answer. Also we’re constantly learning. Nutrition is really individual and that’s, I think, one of the themes that’s evolved over the last, I don’t know, decades of nutrition research and is even starting to be acknowledged in the dietary guidelines themselves. And the most recent ones is how individual nutrition is for all kinds of reasons.

Mike Haney (09:10):

First biological, our bodies react differently to different kinds of food. But also cultural reasons or affordability reasons, historical reasons. There’s all kinds of reasons that nutrition is individual. So take all of that. And there’s a lot of other reasons. Those are just a handful. All of that says, boy, it’s really hard to tell people what to eat. And as a person trying to read guidance, whether that’s in a story in the New York Times or a story on our site or the official government guidelines, it’s really difficult to distill down the question of like, all right, what should I eat? Even though that’s what a lot of folks really want to know. So I do think there’s confusion that comes in.

Mike Haney (09:43):

And I think the, put in the most charitable way, I think the goals of anybody who’s putting out sort of dietary guidelines, whether that be the American Heart Association or whether it be the government, or even to the extent that we try to distill things down into understandable guidance, we’re trying to cut through some of that confusion and give people something to sort of latch onto and say, all right, at least directionally, here’s some kind of advice. And I think that’s probably the right lens to look at the dietary guidelines through, as opposed to this is absolutely the word from God. And we can get deeper into sort of why that is and the challenges that exist in creating government guidelines. But to understand that these are directional at best.

Ben Grynol (10:26):

And naive and silly question to ask, but I’m making an assumption here that these differ from country to country, because of diet and cultural differences. There’s not like a global, I mean, there’s probably going to be overlap. I’m making an assumption there. There’s going to be some overlap in dietary guidelines. But one country’s prescriptive guidelines, like follow this food pyramid, follow this arrangement of nutrition, can be completely different than another country. And then people are sitting in there and they’re like, which ones do I pay attention to? What’s the outlook on that?

Mike Haney (11:06):

Yeah. A hundred percent. That’s absolutely right. And really what we try to tackle in this piece was just the US guidelines. Although it would be a really interesting question to look at how much they differ, particularly among different cultures. You’d probably find that Western European guidelines are relatively similar to the US. Although Europe in general tends to take a more restrictive or conservative approach to things like additives or genetically modified things. You might get some differences. But certainly in other non-Western European cultures where the food practices are just different, the kinds of local crops, the historical things that people eat are different. You’d get fairly different guidelines.

Mike Haney (11:46):

I think you’re right. That there would be a commonality. We’re all human. Human biology works a certain way. I don’t think there’s any guidelines that would say like you should eat 10 pounds of sugar a year and that’s great for you. So there, I think there will be commonality, but definitely in terms of the specific foods, the arrangement of proportions of those foods in a given diet, I think would vary a fair amount. Here we just looked the US ones, because it’s sort of all we could tackle and probably the most relevant, at least to our US audience.

Ben Grynol (12:18):

There you go. Now there’s another post to do some forensic investigation into global guidelines. So let’s go into this idea of the food pyramid. It’s the thing that we hear colloquially all the time, the pyramid, the classic pyramid. But at the base of that pyramid seems to be carbohydrates, which from what we know from metabolic health, not all carbs are made equal, one. And two, carbohydrates in general, especially naked ones, that being ones that aren’t paired with fat fiber or protein, will have an impact on metabolic health. We know that. That’s what we do. That’s what we see based on having CGM as a technology. So why don’t we go into this idea of what exactly is the pyramid? How did carbs get to the base of that pyramid to begin with?

Mike Haney (13:13):

Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, first we should acknowledge that the dietary guidelines, the US dietary guidelines, have actually dropped the pyramid. So the pyramid that we all grew up with and remember being on a poster in the corner of our class, they don’t actually use that anymore. They swapped it out for something called MyPlate. And it’s literally a picture of a plate and they’re sort of showing different proportions to what should be on your plate. And they have moved much more toward emphasizing whole fruits and vegetables, and away from emphasizing, certainly refined grains, but even dropping proportions of whole grains. So the guidelines have definitely moved in the right direction, in the last sort of five or 10 years. Still lots of things that need to be changed, and we could talk about those.

Mike Haney (13:54):

But in terms of where it came from, Dr. Lustig actually points out in one of his books that the idea of the pyramid actually originated in Sweden. We didn’t come up with it. Sweden dropped it, but we kept it as a device to sort of communicate these guidelines. And there’s a lot in the piece that goes through the history of how grains ended up playing sort of a larger role or carbs ended up playing a larger role. And it can definitely take on a sort of conspiratorial tone. And there’s some great detail in there that both Dr. Lustig and Dr. Hyman go into in their books. And there’s other articles out there about it as well, in terms of the people who hired this person to write and what their credentials were.

Mike Haney (14:33):

I think the two things that I really learned in this piece, that I took out of reading that, as a way to think about these guidelines and why a particular portion is 60% of the plate instead of 40%. Or why were carbs there in the first place, in such a big role, is, one, the idea we just talked about that nutrition science is hard. And so these are never going to be perfect. And they’re also not going to be at the cutting edge.

Mike Haney (15:00):

They are probably, because this is a government program. It happens every five years. As a government program, it is subject to a lot of bureaucracy. That these guidelines are always going to be a little bit behind the most recent science. The departments that put these out are going to be conservative in what they’re telling people to do. They’re not going to try to be on the cutting edge. Because, I think again, looking at it charitably, I think the thing they want to avoid is any more whiplash than necessary from one set to another. They don’t want people who get the sense that the government is changing its mind every five years about what you should do, because there’s enough confusion out there already.

Mike Haney (15:38):

So if what you’re trying to do is just directionally point people the right way. You want to try to come back to some very basic things that are pretty widely agreed upon. And on that spectrum that all nutrition science lies on between really front end kind of new theory, maybe only shown in animal models or cell models, all the way up to things that have been maybe studied for decades and that are pretty widely agreed upon, government regulations that happen every five years for government guidelines are going to lean more toward the latter. They’re going to lean more toward the more well established stuff. So even though most of the current food advice probably turned away from carbs and refined grains sooner than the government did, it just takes a while for those guidelines to catch up.

Mike Haney (16:22):

The other point related to the fact that this is a government project and where I think it explains a little bit more some of the, what can seem like sort of backroom dealing in terms of how these guidelines came about. It that, as a government project, it is not a hundred percent science driven. It’s just never going to be, politics and lobbying are going to come into the creation of this kind of project, which is a way of saying the food industry’s going to have a say. That’s just the way the government works. And I’m not here to sort of debate the morality of that or even that as a practical issue. But I think it’s useful to recognize and to know that, yeah, early on carbs were a big part of the overall mix because the food industry at that time, in the sixties and seventies, was producing a whole lot of grain and needed something to do with it. And particular food lobbies had a pretty good influence and they were able to sort of exert some influence on this guidance.

Mike Haney (17:18):

And Dr. Lustig has been a great voice on this, and goes into great detail in his book to reveal more of how that happens and what that kind of relationship looks like. And even in the last 10 years or so, there were some independent review, and National Academy of Sciences reviewed the process by which guidelines were created and found that there was probably more bias and conflicts of interest on the committees creating the guidelines than is ideal. Which is to say relationships with food industry of the people who were working on the guidelines. And this is a big problem in nutrition science in general, that a lot of nutrition science is funded by the food industry because as a nutrition scientist somebody has to pay for your work. Oftentimes the best way to find that funding is in the nutrition business. There’s a whole other debate about whether or not that actually then influences the science.

Mike Haney (18:07):

But all of which is just to remember that when we talk about the, particularly the government dietary guidelines, remember this is a product of a political process. And so there’s going to be other kinds of influence on this. And it’s just another reminder to not take these particular guidelines as sort of, again, the sort of word from on high and the absolute what we should do, but rather directional. And we could talk about sort of where these guidelines, where the rubber meets the road, and what they’re actually used for, and where this starts to matter.

Ben Grynol (18:40):

The macroeconomic factors are things that play so deeply into this story by the sounds of it. And it’s something that, it’s not something that happens over months or years, it’s something that happens over decades. And because we know policy and governance and all of these things take so long to change and implement and evolve over time, that there’s a lot that would go into it. So it’s understandable. How much of it do you think also has to do, like you touch on the science, but how much of it do you also think has to do with the technology standpoint where it’s like, well, there wasn’t really a good way. Sure things could be measured from a science standpoint previously, but now we’ve got with glucose monitoring as one piece of technology. And we know that monitoring multiple molecules, multiple analytes in the body, like insulin and cortisol.

Ben Grynol (19:36):

Like there’s a huge benefit to being able to do that, especially in real time. But right now, we’re very far away from that, from a technology standpoint. So there’s not really large data sets where we can start to question some of the previous science or even the governance of these policies. How much of the technology piece do you think comes into play where maybe, let’s do the thought experiment, in like 10 years time, do you think there’s enough data that it’s like, man, we should really like flip this MyPlate. We should like flip it on its head because this doesn’t make sense anymore. What’s your outlook on that?

Mike Haney (20:15):

I think that gets into more of that question of why nutrition science is hard to do. And I think it is absolutely true that more data is better. And I think any nutrition researcher would be happy to have access to more kind of a hard data in that way. To be able to measure different molecules that are happening in the body in relationship to food. I think it’s one factor. I think we do have really good, despite what I said before about the challenges of the different kinds of experimental design that exists today, we do also have very good methods for uncovering things. And I think it’s always useful to remember, I think it’s very easy to criticize any kind of scientific research because it’s often messy. In particular in nutrition science research, because it’s very messy and confusing, but it’s also useful to remember that we have learned a lot and we do know a lot.

Mike Haney (21:07):

And these processes that we’ve established and these different kinds of experimental designs do uncover a lot. We know a lot more today about the role of insulin and insulin resistance in the body, about what glucose does in the body, just to focus on our little corner of the body. So I think things like having more data, if we had population level glucose readings or insulin readings or cortisol readings, or HSCRP readings, absolutely that would help us be, that would help inform the research that we do. But even that will not be a silver bullet because you’ll still have to take into account all of the confounding factors. That’s one of the great challenges in nutrition research is there’s a million confounding factors, of people’s genetics and their microbiome and the part of the country they live in and how much sunlight they got.

Mike Haney (21:56):

And it’s really difficult to tease out all of the sort of confounding factors in a way that would say like, oh, well the average glucose reading for this food is X. Therefore we can say definitively, this food is bad. Will just never be the case. They’ll always be exceptions to it. There’ll be other, again, confounding factors that have to be taken into account. But more data will absolutely be helpful in revealing more of what’s going on in the body, more of the mechanisms.

Mike Haney (22:22):

And as I think our goal here is to be able to move a lot of the advice and guidance upstream, to make it more individual, to allow people to sort of make better choices, which getting back to our topic here of dietary guidelines, we’ll change the role. I think ultimately we’re probably talking 20 years down the line here of what dietary guidelines are seeking to do, when we ultimately have better individual pictures of what’s going on in our bodies and how our bodies respond. And that information is widely disseminated, not just concentrated among a very small group of sort of bio hackery folks. But if lots of people have access to that kind of data, you can see a world in which that really affects how dietary guidelines are created and what the purpose of them is.

Ben Grynol (23:04):

It’s so interesting. It goes back to the idea of correlation is not causation. Because it’s really easy to run a regression and find that the rate at which somebody watched the movie Titanic had a direct correlation with the number of glucose spikes they had in a day. And it’s like, there you go. And there will be some study on that IP value. So knowing what we know, what do today’s guidelines still get wrong?

Mike Haney (23:34):

Well, there’s a couple of points. One, it might be useful to sort of back up. And when we talk about what they get wrong and kind of why this matters, one of the things that was really useful to me in this article was answering the question, why do these matter at all? Given everything we’ve said, right? Food is very individual. These guidelines are never going to be perfect. They’re only sort of directional. All right. So why do we care? Why does anybody even read these things? Why do we care that the posters up in our kids’ classrooms? And the answer to that is that they do inform an awful lot of policy. So the reason that these guidelines were created in the first place was because there’s an awful lot of departments that have to create policy that is much more prescriptive and specific about particular foods, or sort of a nutritional picture.

Mike Haney (24:15):

So for example, school lunches, SNAP, which was formally known as food stamps here, but is a food assistance program. WIC, which is a food assistance program for new mothers and for infants. Those kinds of programs have very specific kind of calorie and macronutrient mixes or specific foods that become part of the policy that say, okay, kids in school lunches have to have X number of servings. So vegetables, and here’s what counts as a vegetable. Or they can only have this much sugar. And that kind of advice does flow down stream from these guidelines. That’s where the guidelines actually do matter. They do direct actual policy that translates into real food that people eat if they’re interacting with these government programs. Which lots of people do, half the babies in this country are involved in WIC in some way. So there’s real impact. Where do they still get wrong?

Mike Haney (25:03):

One great example is too much sugar. So in 2020, they were looking at guidelines again, and the committee who worked on them recommended dropping sugar from 10% of the calories to 6% of the calories. The ultimate guideline stuck with the 10% figure. And Dr. Casey Means, our Chief Medical Officer, wrote a great op-ed talking specifically about this and diving a little bit more into the role that guidelines play. And ultimately their rationale for it was that there wasn’t enough science to show that there was a reason to change. That the status quo was 10%. And that even though the committee had sort of staunchly advised dropping it to 6%, given their read of the science, again, leaning toward that sort of conservative don’t change it unless we really have a good reason to change it. The guidelines stayed at 10%.

Mike Haney (25:55):

Now what’s the difference between six and 10%. Maybe it’s not that much. But if you think about a kid’s school lunch and how big of a Twinkie they’re going to get in their school lunch, or how much dessert or how much added sugar can be in the foods that they’re eating, over time that definitely makes a difference. The other ways in which the guidelines, I think, still have some room to grow is in the fat question. And that was one of our original questions, was why was fat demonized for so long? And there’s a kind of long and involved story around that, that intersects with both the science and the sort of politics of it. But, again, I think it falls in the sort of conservative side. The guidelines have really, they’ve evolved to recognize that saturated, that not all fat is created equal. That saturated fat is the thing we should probably focus on limiting if anything. The trans fat is really the bad fat, the definitely bad fat. And that fat doesn’t play necessarily the role in cardiovascular issues that it had been made out to be for a long time.

Mike Haney (26:57):

And so there’s still, I think, I think a lot of people would argue that their guidelines are on fat are still not up to date with the latest research. But again, I think they still follow on that kind of conservative side of they’re just going to be really slow to change. As we said at the beginning, if you’re looking for the cutting edge research, don’t look to the government dietary guidelines.

Ben Grynol (27:21):

So given everything, should people pay attention to them? What’s the avenue, do you pay attention to this? Do you pay attention to… What’s the takeaway? Is it pay attention to influencers that you trust like Dr. Mark Hyman? Or how should people think about it, knowing that we’ll leave the pyramid where it is. And luckily let’s hope that they don’t take it away from [inaudible 00:27:47], because that would just be detrimental to the pyramid. There would be no more pyramids, but what can people do? Should they pay attention to guidelines at all? Or should they just discover diet for themselves based on who they trust in the health and wellness ecosystem, as they take their own path for discovery and self education.

Mike Haney (28:07):

So after all we’ve talked about, you’re going to ask me to distill down how people should figure out what to eat?

Ben Grynol (28:12):

Basically, that’s the takeaway.

Mike Haney (28:13):

Yeah. Good, good. We finally solved it here. My personal take on this, and again, I’ll try to relate it to this particular article, is I think where any kind of guidelines, whether they be from a particular organization or the government are helpful is directionally. And I think you will find that as you look across these guidelines, there’s not an enormous amount of conflict. It’s not like the American Diabetes Association is saying vegetables are terrible for you, and the government is saying you should only eat vegetables. They all move in a general direction. And I think that’s a lot of what we come back to when we try to impart any sort of guidance towards folks. We’re very careful that we don’t endorse any particular dietary philosophy. We don’t say you should absolutely be vegan or you should absolutely be paleo.

Mike Haney (28:55):

We recognize that nutrition is individual. And I think it makes sense not to ignore that. I think people should absolutely take into account culture, taste, affordability, all the things that influence what we eat. We eat differently as parents than we did as younger single people because of just all the factors that come into play about how you make food for your family and what your kids will eat and what you put on the table. I think it’s important not to ignore all that.

Mike Haney (29:22):

And I think where these, any kind of guidelines or guidance, whether it be from the government or folks that you follow, should be taken as directional and you should look for the things that do sort of intersect. So things like focus on whole foods. Try to eat things that actually look like food. Try to limit processed food. Like you probably won’t go wrong by following some of that basic kind of advice. And if you just do that, if you limit the amount of sort of additional additives, processed stuff, added sugar, added salt, added fat. And if you focus on eating whole foods, that look like foods, that’s a good place to start.

Mike Haney (30:04):

And I think from there exactly to your point, you can further tweak if you find people who eat in a way that looks good to you, that is the kind of food that you’re interested in, and that as you experiment find makes you feel better. I think that’s another thing that we see a lot in our members, as they put on the CGM and they start to adjust their diet and their lifestyle a bit based on the data they’re getting. What we hear over and over is, “Boy, cutting out cereal in the morning or oatmeal in the morning in favor of something that produced less of a glucose response, just got rid of my morning slump. It made me feel better.”

Mike Haney (30:40):

And I think that’s an important thing to pay attention to as you kind of hone and refine what you eat, beyond that kind of very high level directional stuff. Which again, everybody from Rob Lustig to the government, there will be some intersection in all of those kind of dietary guidelines based on what we have learned over the past decades of nutrition research. So I think that’s the place to start. I think if you look at your diet and you find it is primarily made up of boxed packaged foods, and there’s a ton of added sugar in it, and you find you’re not really eating much whole meat, whole vegetables, whole fruits, that’s a good place to start. Beyond that, then tweak based on those other kinds of inputs.

Ben Grynol (31:22):

It’s a good reminder because you hear it often, that don’t take one source of input as the gospel. And so when, whether it’s a book, whether, and not about, let’s just use the wide example of anything in the world, and I know we’re generalizing, but you take one book and you’re like, that’s the gospel. You take one influencer, you take one podcast you listen to, one thing as the source of knowledge and you’re like, snap your fingers. That’s it. I have everything I need to know about this one thing. And it’s the idea of there’s so many other factors that come down to it. So if you hear of one person talking about like, this works really well for me. It’s like, you have to look at what is in front of you. What makes you feel good?

Ben Grynol (32:07):

Like, what you’re saying is what do you actually, what makes you feel good? And then if you are using something like a CGM or doing blood panels or, or, or, and you’re seeing the data, then you can start to find patterns between when I eat these things, they’re giving me these numbers and they make me feel this way. It’s a much better thing than just saying, “Hey, I heard Haney talking about this one way of eating and that’s what I’m going to do.” It’s like, well, that was maybe Haney’s way of eating versus what works for you. So I mean, this just in general, as a piece of content, blog post, is a huge reminder to say it’s there for a reason, but it doesn’t mean you should anchor on it.

Mike Haney (32:50):

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I actually, I pulled out a really nice quote as I was looking back at this article. We ended on a really nice quote from Mark Hyman in Food Fix that I think is worth sort of sharing out here. Where he says, “Your diet should be aspirational, not perfect. It should contribute to better health for you, a better world for humans, including food workers and farm workers, and a better world for the environment, our climate, and our economy.” I really like that idea that your diet should be aspirational, not perfect to just remind us that there is no perfect diet. It’s too individual for that. There’s a lot of other factors that you can bring into it, or not, depending on your own personal values and what’s important to you. And relieve a little bit of the stress around thinking you’re going to find a perfect diet. And certainly, again, to tie back to our article that whatever the government is handed down in their latest MyPlate graphic is the perfect thing, it’s all directional and that’s useful. It’s useful to have that direction.